Why African Americans Have Twice the Unemployment Rate of the White People (Essay Sample)

Why African Americans Have Twice the Unemployment Rate of The White People
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Why African Americans Have Twice the Unemployment Rate of The White People
Over the past half-century, African American individuals have borne the brunt of high unemployment. In particular, the racial employment disparity means that white people have twice more jobs as African Americans. The vast racial unemployment gap has remained mostly static over the same period. Even when considering specific demographics such as gender and age, African American unemployment rate remains higher than that of the white race. In essence, African Americans still suffer double the white race’s unemployment rate due to discriminatory hiring and economic failure in majority-black sectors. 
Foremost, African Americans face considerable discrimination during hiring processes. The United States labor market features unnecessary exclusion of African Americans from lucrative job opportunities leaving them in poorly-paying occupations. Exclusion from such positions means they never enjoy stable careers, leaving them insecure jobs that lack overtime pay, minimum wage, and collective bargaining. Such discrimination primarily stems from loopholes in civil rights laws. For instance, Hersch and Shinall (2015) argue that many states impede affirmative action progress in job inclusion through minimum worker thresholds, which exclude employers with less than 15 workers from implementing civil rights policies. Consequently, persisting with such discriminative laws only aggravates the racial unemployment gap by blocking African Americans from existing opportunities and compelling the workers to seek low-earning opportunities. Undoubtedly, African Americans have a higher unemployment rate than White people thanks to discriminatory hiring practices, which locks the former race out of the existing employment positions. 
Additionally, African Americans suffer higher unemployment rates than whites due to failures in the economic sectors that typically employ most black people. Blacks primarily work in the manufacturing sector, a sector that is highly sensitive to economic shocks. Following the great recession of 2008, many black individuals lost their manufacturing jobs (Walley, 2017). The recovery programs in the aftermath of the recession’s shock had an insignificant impact in restoring the jobs due to the market’s slow response, exacerbating the unemployment gap between the black and white people. In addition, economic policy actions by local and state governments did little to help the high unemployment rate among black people. For example, according to Evans et al. (2019), in the wake of the 2008 economic recession, most state governments cut on spending, including the manufacturing sector, resulting in unnecessary job losses for the African Americans. Lower spending meant that affected businesses could not recover fast enough to reinstate the lost work opportunities. Indeed, economic shock on the critical manufacturing sector meant that more African Americans lost jobs than whites, thus perpetuating the unemployment rate between the two races. 
America has seen a sustain